Processors - Page 113

We reported over the weekend on the 16-core processor from AMD, but if you want to get in early, you can buy the Opteron variant of it... right now. The AMD Operton 6300-series, or "Warsaw" processor, is designed for 2- and 4-way goodness in servers.

It uses the socket G34, and are based on the Piledriver architecture. The new chips feature between 12 and 16 cores, 16MB of L3 cache, quad-channel DDR3 memory and much more. They should have a much better performance-per-watt ratio over today's Opteron 6300 series, too. The company were poised to release these new CPUs later in Q1 2014, but ShopBLT is offering a pre-order on the 12-core version for $421, and the 16-core Operton for $663.

The details on the processors are as follows: the 12-core version is the Opteron 6338 HE, which has a 99W TDP. The 16-core processor, is the Opteron 6370 HE, and also has a 99W TDP. The HE stands for high efficiency, and should feature moderate clock speeds to keep the power numbers down.

Intel should fully unveil its 9-series chipset as we get closer to Computex 2014 in Taipei in June, but between now and then we'll have to tease you a little on what to expect from Intel's upcoming Haswell refresh-capable chipset.

The new 9-series chipset won't bring many new technologies to the consumer, but it will feature six SATA 6Gbps ports, 14 USB ports, PCI Express 3.0, and the usual array of other technologies. Where things are new, we have support for SSDs in the PCIe M.2 form factor - capable of driving 1GB/sec bandwidth. Intel device protection with boot guard technology, as well as Intel Rapid Storage technology which will support PCI Express-based drives.

There shouldn't be SATA Express support, which is a disappointment, as it is capable of driving 2GB/sec maximum bandwidth. We can't complain about 1GB/sec, as it is much higher than SATA 6Gbps' maximum rate of 600MB/sec.

I was pretty impressed what what I read about NVIDIA's Tegra K1 processor at CES 2014, but it looks like the new SoC will be kicking some serious benchmark ass when it hits.

Some leaked benchmarks involving Lenovo's ThinkVision 28, which is powered by the Tegra K1 SoC, have leaked. These leaked benchmarks are using Futuremark's 3DMark, where the Tegra K1 SoC just dominates the competition. Keep in mind that the ThinkVision 28 was actually clocked at just 2GHz, and not the 2.3GHz that NVIDIA claims the Tegra K1 can be operated at.

Other benchmarks suggest that NVIDIA's Tegra K1 processor can also beat an Intel Haswell-powered notebook with integrated graphics. This is a big deal, as a Haswell-powered notebook will chew up much more power than an SoC. It looks like NVIDIA is onto a big, mobile winner here, folks.

The last we heard on Intel's Broadwell CPUs is that they would feature 18 cores, but the release date on them was Q4 2014, now we're hearing dates of Q3 2014.

The new Broadwell CPUs will usher in a refined 14nm process, and three-gate transistors, the first CPUs to be made on the new tech. The new Broadwell architecture will be close to the company's on-the-market Haswell processors, but will see reduced power consumption, as well as increased performance. We should also see more advanced integrated graphics on Broadwell-based CPUs, too.

We should expect Intel's Broadwell CPUs to be released in Q3 2014, but the big problem here is that Intel will be competing with its Haswell-E CPU. Unleashing two new CPUs, that will overlap each other in some markets, might be hard for Intel. We should see some more concrete information, specs and prices toward Computex in June.

CES 2014 - We've already seen the Consumer Electronics Show 2014 start off, unofficially, with a bunch of 4K goodies being announced, with Qualcomm not being left out on its own - with the company announcing its new SoC, the Snapdragon 802.

Qualcomm's Snapdragon 802 SoC is destined for TVs, where it is a TV-specific quad-core SoC that borrows features from the Snapdragon 800 SoC, and the "Ultra HD" 805 chip for mobile video. The Snapdragon 802 is all about powering 4K content in your living room, with the processor capable of multi-tasking, where it can easily handle browsing the Internet, or switching things up and streaming a movie or playing four HD video streams on your TV.

The Snapdragon 802 also has HQV, or Hollywood Quality Video, a video-processing engine which upconverts 1080p content to a level "approaching Ultra HD." The actual specs of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 802 are: a quad-core 1.8GHz Krait CPU, Adreno 330 GPU, two-stream dual-band 802.11ac, AllJoyn integration and Snapdragon Studio Access content protection.

Intel's upcoming 14nm Xeon Phi, or Knights Landing CPU, will reportedly feature an insane amount of technology compared to what we see now in the Xeon range. The new Knights Landing CPU will see Intel increase the performance, throughput, and total TFLOP count with the next generation MIC (Many Integrated Core) card.

Intel's Knights Landing will be based on the company's Silvermont CPU architecture, which we see in the Bay Trail mobile products. Knights Landing on the otherhand, will support 512-bit AVX operations, and a new mesh interconnect architecture which will see 72 cores to ship on each PCB.

The new CPU with 72 cores on-board will also see 16GB of on-package eDRAM, and six DDR4 memory controllers which will be capable of seeing over 384GB of DDR4 memory. Then we have the rumor that Intel could abandon PCI-Express 3.0 because of its latency issues, and shift over to QPI which will ship with the Skylake-EX chipset.

Rumor has it that LG is working on its on system on a chip (SoC0 that is known as Odin. There are reportedly going to be two versions of this new SoC, one will be a quad-core part, while the other will be an eight-core part.

Both SoCs will be based on ARM's Cortex A9 and A15 cores, with LG using ARM's architecture, and tweaking it to create a customized version for its devices. This isn't any different to what Qualcomm does with the Krait line of chips, or Samsung and its Exynos range. The difference will come with LG using TMSC's facilities to manufacture the SoC, as it doesn't have its own in-house fab unit like Samsung does.

This is all coming from Korean news site, DigitalTimes, who reports that the quad-core Odin chip would be baked into LG's smart TVs in 2014 and beyond. The eight-core version will most likely be baked into the next-gen G2 smartphone and future LG-made slates. I'm guessing it might even be used in an upcoming Nexus device, as LG is the company building the Nexus smartphones right now.

Intel may dominate the CPU industry, but it doesn't do too well in the system on a chip (SoC) market, especially against the likes of companies like Qualcomm. Well, it looks like Intel is not just going to roll over and give up, if its new Atom SoC roadmap is anything to go by.

Intel is hoping to increase CPU performance by 5x, and GPU performance by a whopping 15x, all before 2016. The current Bay Trail-based Atom SoC will be replaced in late 2014 by the 14-nm based "Cherry Trail" silicon which will feature "Airmont" GPU and next-gen Intel graphics. At the start of next year, we should begin to see smartphone-bound, dual-core "Merrifield" Atom chips, with a quad-core version arriving in 2H 2014.

In late 2014, Intel will unleash its new Atom SoC, codenamed "Sofia", which is made for entry-level devices. There will be two variants, one released in 2014 which will feature an integrated HSPA+ communications chip, while the second model, to be released in 2015, will feature LTE capabilities. Funnily enough, at first, these communications chips will be ARM-based, but will eventually be converted to x86 architecture.

Today AMD confirmed that its upcoming Kaveri APU will support both Mantel and TrueAudio, which ties it in nicely with AMD's Radeon R9 290/290X and R7 260X GPUs. The company says that Kaveri will push an impressive 862 GFLOPs of processing power with its internal 512 GPU cores being clocked to 800MHz.

During its APU13 event today, AMD demoed Kaveri by pitting it against an Intel i7-4770K which was paired up with a GeForce GT 630 GPU. The Kaveri-based system managed to pull out a consistent frame rate of 28-40 frames per second while running through the Battlefield 4 single player campaign set to 1920x1080 with medium settings. The Intel-based system did not fair near as well with frame rates in the 12-14fps rage.

While some may feel that it is unfair to test with a low-end GPU, I disagree. I feel that AMD's target market is those who do not want to spend $1500-4000 on a high-end gaming machine, and are happy with mediocre performance with just an APU. There is a huge market out there that consist of casual gamers who would not buy a $500-900 GPU and will be more inclined to spend $200-$300 on an APU that can run Battlefield 4, CoD: Ghost, or even League of Legends on medium settings.

During IDF back in September, Intel announced its new 14nm Broadwell processor and said that we should see it begin to ship to OEMs sometime around the end of 2013. Unfortunately, that will not be the case. During the company's quarterly earnings call, Intel said that Broadwell has been delayed until the first quarter of 2014.

The delay is due to a recent issue with defect density in the silicon wafers that were being produced. Intel says that this issue has been fixed and yield levels are back up to an acceptable number. Some analyst speculated that the delay was actually due to an excess of Ivy Bridge inventory to which CEO Brian Krzanich replied "absolutely not." From the beginning, Broadwell has been expected to go retail in 2014, and a setback of three months is not that big of a deal.

A transcript of Krzanich comment on the matter is below:

Silicon Motion has just announced the launch of a new cost-effective USB 3.0 controller for use in flash drives. The new SM3267 integrates an embedded crystal-based oscillator, power ICs as well as the control silicon all into a tiny package that lowers overall system cost. This new SM3267 also enables industry-leading data transfer rates with speeds up to 160MB/s read, a 50-percent improvement over most other single-channel controllers on the market today.

"We are very excited to introduce SM3267, our first crystal-less USB 3.0 solution with integrated power ICs," said Wallace Kou, President and CEO of Silicon Motion. "SM3267 offers superior performance with competitive cost when compared to other USB 3.0 controllers in the market, and we believe our solution will help accelerate the market in transitioning from legacy USB 2.0 flash drives to the latest generation USB 3.0 drives. This is another example of Silicon Motion leading the market in bringing new, advanced technology to the mainstream market. We are pleased to announce that SM3267 has received design-ins from most of our current USB controller customers, including many top-tier OEMs, and we expect SM3267-based USB 3.0 flash drives will be commercially available starting in the fourth quarter of 2013."

Silicon Motion's SM3267 provides an ultra-high performance, cost-effective USB 3.0 controller with industry leading capabilities and technologies including:

We are used to the usual teardowns, that usually involve ripping a physical device apart, but iFixit has torn down the actual A7 silicon that we find in the Apple iPhone 5S. iFixit used an Ion Beam Etcher, which takes layers off of a semiconductor, analyzing just how it is made. iFixit worked with Chipworks on the A7 teardown, discovering quite a bit:

Intel's Principal Engineer Francois Piednoël has teased some of the first kinda-official performance numbers of its upcoming Atom Z3770 processor, which is a Silvermont-based Bay Trail implementation running at 1.47GHz.

Francois showed AnandTech some of the numbers running the processor through Cinebench 11.5, providing a score of 1.47. Considering AMD's A4-5000 Kabini-based SoC running at 1.5GHz pumps out a score of 1.5, this isn't too bad at all. The Bay Trail SKU that was tested provides performance close to a 2GHz (or so) mobile Penryn-based Core 2 Duo processor.

This means that this tablet SoC provides performance in a multi-threaded environment that compares with a full-fledged 2010 Apple MacBook Air.

IFA 2013 - TweakTown's Johannes Knapp was on hand earlier today for a live demonstration of NVIDIA's upcoming Project Logan. Project Logan is of course NVIDIA's next-generation System on a Chip (SoC) Tegra Processor that is based off of the Kepler architecture.

In the video, we can see that the renderings on the tablet are very close to the same quality you would see on a high-end GPU inside of a PC. Of course, however, when the number of polygons being rendered is increased, the frame rate takes a hit, but as the demo shows, this can be compensated for using tessellation. Check out the video above for more information on NVIDIA's Project Logan.

Another big rumor for this morning, is that Apple's upcoming iPhone 5S smartphone would run the next-generation A7 processor from Apple. The A7 processor is said to be roughly 31% faster than its predecessor, the A6.

This is according to a tweet by Fox News' Clayton Morris, who says his sources have also mentioned a "separate chip devoted to motion tracking." At the moment, we don't know what this motion tracking chip on the iPhone 5S would be capable of, but it could bring something to the iPhone 5S that matches some of the motion features of Samsung's Galaxy S range of smartphones.

This would make sense, since a profile of Apple's Jony Ive by Bloomberg earlier this year hints at this possibility: "Longer term, Ive also has shown interest in altering how people control their computers. He has met with makers of gesture technology that lets people navigate their gadgets by moving their hands -- without touching the screen, said a personal familiar with those interactions."

Let's face it: everyone loves CPUs that are clocked to astronomical speeds. It is the reason many of us run enthusiast grade unlocked processors that we push to the limits. When AMD first announced its 5GHz monster--the FX-9590--I'll have to admit I was a little speechless, as was most of the tech world, but not for the fact that it was able to Turbo to 5GHz, but for the fact that AMD priced it at $900.

Generally known for their low-cost, high-performance CPUs, that $900 price tag shocked many AMD enthusiasts. In the professional world, many reviewers and industry analysts cried foul saying that a $900 price tag would never work. AMD has apparently heard those statements and cries loud and clear and today slashed the price of the FX-9590 by $500, making it cost just a mere $400.

Today, Marvell announced that China Mobile's first self-branded smartphone will feature a Marvell ARMADA Mobile PXA988 processor. Dubbed the M601, the Android-based smartphone will feature unified 3G performance thanks to the ARMADA PXA988 which has been designed to deliver high-performance computing with industry-leading graphic capabilities, while at the same time producing best-in-class robust connectivity.

The ARMADA PXA988 is a unified 3G and LTE single-chip solution that integrates a high-performance low-power ARM Cortex A9 application processor alongside cutting-edge cellular modems that support advanced multimedia and graphics capabilities. The PXA988 also features TD-HSPA+ R8 as well as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, FM radio, and GPS.

"I am very pleased to see the launch of China Mobile's first self-branded smartphone, which is a major milestone for China Mobile and over a billion consumers in China. In the past several years, we have seen the fast development of China's 3G TD-SCDMA technology and the rapid growth of the smartphone market, thanks to the close collaboration among China Mobile and global companies, such as Samsung, ZTE, Yulong Coolpad, Lenovo and others," said Weili Dai, President and Co-founder of Marvell. "I am very proud of our collaboration with China Mobile and Marvell's investment in developing advanced TD-SCDMA technology. I am very thankful for the innovation, dedication and contributions made by the China Mobile and Marvell global engineering teams."

Ok, before you read this post, please make sure you've gone to your cupboard and picked up your salt, because you're going to need it. Over at the Chiphell forums, it looks like some users have found some details on a CPU from AMD.

Considering AMD aren't releasing their 28nm Steamroller-based "Kaveri" APUs until next year, I'd like to know where this new processor is coming from. The new processor in question is codenamed "Baeca", or the Phenom IV X12 170 processor, on a 25nm process. This processor is pretty incredible, with 12 cores and a base clock speed of 6GHz.

All of this is wrapped into a beautiful 75W package, and includes 24MB of L3 cache. The new processor would come with a bunch of new instruction sets, including 3DNow(+), AMD-V and AMD-IV. The new processor would also arrive on the AM4 socket, which is a 1356-pin variant. The leaker of the information has said that this processor would launch in the second half of 2014, after AMD launch their new Steamroller-based Kaveri APUs.

We are finally seeing 8-core processors in our smartphones, but do we really need all of this power? According to chipmaker Qualcomm, we don't. More specifically, Qualcomm's Senior Vice President, Anand Chandrasekher has come out and said 8-core processors for smartphones are just "dumb."

Chandrasekher likened adding more cores to taking eight lawnmower engines, putting them together and calling it an eight cylinder Ferrari engine. Chandrasekher added that Qualcomm are focusing on providing consumers with a good experience, which starts with a good modem, long battery life and an affordable price point.

The Qualcomm executive said that adding more cores into the mix is like throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing what sticks. Your move, Samsung.

Today, Marvel unveiled the new ARMADA 1500 Mini SoC that Google used in its hugely popular Chromecast. Being billed as "Game-Changing," the ARMADA 1500 Mini has been optimized for low-power applications such as TV Dongles like the Google Chromecast. Marvel says that the new chip has been "designed to provide instantaneous and seamless access to applications such as YouTube, Netflix and other cloud-based content, and deliver a ground-breaking multi-screen experience across smart mobile devices, laptops and HDTVs transforming any big screen into a smart and immersive entertainment device."

Weili Dai, President and Co-Founder of Marvell: